More thoughts on the Spider-marriage

Occasional Superheroine has a thought-provoking post on marriage and heroism that...provoked some thoughts? :)

Actually, some of my thoughts were provoked less by the piece itself (which on the whole makes some good points) than by some of the commentary focusing on whether religion is necessary for ethical behavior, either on a personal or a cultural level. My own sense is that it is not--certainly there are atheists who use the concept of "there is no god!" to excuse bad behavior (I haven't seen it myself, not knowing that many atheists IRL, but I have no problem believing that it happens because some people are just like that :)), but there are religious people who manage to twist their religious convictions to do the same thing. Human beings are highly skilled at rationalizing what they do regardless of their worldview. Most religions promote good behavior, but so does simple observation of how the world works--for example, the concept of reciprocity (you tend to get what you give) is one that's easy enough to grasp.

But anyway.

I don't read any of the Spider-Man comics and don't intend to start, so all I'll ever know about this is what I read on the internet. I was sorry to hear about the potentially-impending end of the Spider-marriage, and particularly the circumstances surrounding it, which seem a bit of a stretch.

(To be honest, I've never really thought of Mephisto as a devil-analogue, although I know that's what he is supposed to be--to me, he's just a villain with some more-or-less theological associations. I don't think of comic book Thor as a real representation of god Thor, either. More important in most of the Mephisto stories I've read have been the literary associations--the deal-with-the-devil stories, the hero-as-Faust stories--that appear to be the maybe-basis for the upcoming Spider-story.)

As for why they're doing this (if indeed they are)... Maybe I've been lucky. I've never thought of marriage as work--I've found that if you like your spouse and you both genuinely care about what's best for each other, it's pretty easy to be married. In fact, before the kids came along, there really wasn't a lot of difference (other than living in the same house) between how my husband and I were as a dating couple and how we were as a married couple. So my impression is that the only real stories you can't tell about a married Peter that you could tell about a single Peter are pretty much the ones that involved his relationships with other women. Is that really that important?